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Dec 1 2016

# London Grip New Poetry – Winter 2016-7

*

This issue of London Grip New Poetry features poems by:

* J S Watts * Emer Lyons * Pam Job * Kerrin P Sharpe * Joan Michelson
* Hugh McMillan * Barry Smith * Nick Cooke * Melanie Penycate * Rodney Wood
* Ricky Garni * Neil Curry * Ruth Hanover * Donald Atkinson * James Norcliffe
* Bruce Christianson * Cal Freeman * Michael W Thomas * Jackie Lovell * S J Mannion
* Jack Houston * Brian Docherty * Tim Miller * Bruce Barnes * Akpa Arinzechukwu

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be found at lg-new-poetry-winter-2016-7

London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December

Please send submissions to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and a brief, 2-3 line, biography

We prefer to get submissions in the following windows: December-January, March-April, June-July and September-October i.e. avoiding the months when we are busy compiling a new issue

Editorial

Unexpectedly for a Christmas issue, several poems in this posting are about burials and funerals. The arrival of so many good poems on this topic gave us a sense of being invited to tap into some species of zeitgeist. One might be tempted to associate it with this year’s many high-profile deaths – or else with fears that 2016 has dealt a fatal blow to some cherished beliefs and institutions. But in fact the grave-related poems are too varied and too personal to permit any glib group classification. We hope our readers enjoy them and the rest of the contents in this issue.

One of the traditional images of Christmas is the new-born Jesus wrapped in swaddling clothes. As the preceding paragraph reminds us, this image can continue to have resonance beyond the nativity…

    Wrappings

    He felt the world’s first chafe on his new skin
    from strips of cloth his mother made.
    And there were other linen bindings
    he told his friends to pull apart
    from Lazarus’s not-dead hands and feet.
    But the robe the soldiers raffled
    at his gallows – that seemed much too good
    for sharing out among them as torn pieces.

    He left the world, materially speaking,
    some strips of cloth inside a cave with echoes
    of accounts of slings thrown off,
    swift unlacings of strait-jackets
    and ragged lives invisibly repaired –
    all the hand-me-down reports that do
    until we’re old enough to talk about
    unwinding our own bandages and dressings.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

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***

    J S Watts: Lost in the Word Woods

    What follows on is a search for truth, fleeting gods,
    that started here, on unyielding pavements, but began there.
    A truth, some say a meaning – not the, I could not
    be so presumptuous.

    She starts slowly, following the way a sharp word cuts
    home to her darkness, pulsing along the brackened stream
    as it foremothers her, here, there, chasing the light,
    hoping wherever it flows to find the truth
    already fits inside the day or leads outwards
    well beyond the night and into the heart
    where no one ever goes, now, not ever,
    but no it has nowhere to go
    except hoping.

    Even if it would, she can’t, won’t – and the truth
    of all of it, this, whatever this is, has lost itself
    to enlightenment – knowing not feeling –
    falsifying and punctuating the rough particles of life.
    Its dilutions are worldwide, but the World
    has already left, lost so deep
    in the woods flowing out of her, out
    of the wishful light and the claims of reason.
    Day collapses its red embers, experimental soul
    vacuum worthless and emptied without
    the gift of meaning.

    Weakened, the wood carries bleeding notes
    in its leaves, the empty cry
    of an abandoned sylvan god
    intimidated by the spreading presumption
    of neon streets.

J.S.Watts’ poetry and prose has been published and broadcast in Britain, Canada, Australia and the States. She has published two poetry collections, Years Ago you Coloured Me, and Cats and Other Myths , a multi-award nominated poetry pamphlet, Songs of Steelyard Sue (Lapwing Publications) and two novels, A Darker Moon – dark literary fantasy, and Witchlight – paranormal romance, published in the US and UK by Vagabondage Press. See http://www.jswatts.co.uk/

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***

    Emer Lyons: The pieces left after something falls apart

    The opening and closing doors
    rattle the wind chimes,

    reminders of the past
    curl on the shower wall,

    letters loom in the letter box
    like petrol bombs,

    There’s wasn’t enough room anymore;

    weekends were dead headed, hoed.

    Our delicate hand washed remains,
    drip in the garden.

Emer Lyons is an Irish writer, currently living in Dunedin, New Zealand. She has had poetry and fiction published and short listed in anthologies and competitions in Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. She is one of the 2016 emerging playwrights at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin for her play, The Green.

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    Pam Job: S.A.L.O.N.I.K.A

    In here, the air is weighted down with guns.
    I'm standing in the bookshop, subject: war.
    I scan the shelves and titles fall like lead
    shot into my eyes; battles, actions,
    campaigns and, sickeningly, recipes,
    cemeteries, their horizontal grief.
    What next? 'The Joy of Everlasting Conflict?'
    Why do we have words if all their end is steel
    and bayonets in guts and drones that fly unseen?

    I'm killing time in here, idly browsing,
    fastening some connection fraying by the
    year. 'Have you got anything on Salonika?'
    I ask the sales assistant, who's texting on her
    phone. 'How exactly is that spelt?'
    She's not employed to know her stock,
    but to ensure the change she gives adds up.
    I spell it out, she clicks the mouse and checks
    the screen. 'Nothing's showing here, sorry.'

    Like Auden's 'altogether elsewhere',
    Salonika's some half-forgotten outpost
    where 'we' took on Johnny Turk, a useless
    cul-de-sac of war, which kept my father
    safe, until he went to France where bullets
    found him out: Arras, Second Battle
    of, at least's recorded here, but still
    the puzzle of my father's life lies,
    jigsaw pieces on the bookshop floor.

Pam Job has been writing poetry for the last eight years and is a member of the Poetry Wivenhoe team and a co-editor of their publications, one of the most recent being so too have the doves gone, new poetry on the theme of conflict. She has won awards in several national poetry competitions and has been published in various magazines including Acumen and Artemis.

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***

    Kerrin P Sharpe: if you look

    there is something held
    by more than physics
    in this rough air above Verdun

    the souls of soldiers
    some still on horseback
    float in the arms of angels

    the last carrier pigeon
    787-15
    stunned by gas and fumes again

    and again draws fresh air
    from the release loophole
    in Raynal's command post

    and delivers his message
    difficult to breathe
    and falls into the field

    of bone smoke shellfire
    until the wind
    the shadow of larger wings

    raises the brave bird
    beyond the Cathédrale
    Notre-Dame de Verdun
    beyond tomorrow

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***

    Kerrin P Sharpe: en route to Fish Hoek

    when our father checked the radiator
    and forgot all about the hand-brake
    we never forgot being left inside
    the green Austin at the top of Kariba Hill

    or how our father chased the rolling car
    and left his panama hat in the air

    and because not one of us could reach the hand-brake
    we learnt that day a terrible lesson
    from gravity from physics even our baby

    heard fear deep inside the machinery
    of our mother stop her milk

    we never forgot how the old Bedford truck
    lumbered out of the dust at the bottom of the hill
    and positioned itself for the impact

    or when our father reached us and we all knelt
    in the red earth how our baby began to feed

Kerrin P Sharpe is a Christchurch NZ writer. Her first book of poems, Three days in a wishing well was published by Victoria University Press (VUP) in 2012; a group of her poems appeared in Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet) in 2013; her second book, There’s a medical name for this was published by VUP in 2014 and her third collection Rabbit rabbit has just been published (2016), again by VUP

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    Joan Michelson: Reading

    I wake and see my father reading.
    He’s sitting in a kitchen chair,
    or on the couch that disappeared
    the year he moved into The Home.

    Or in the chair that eases back,
    gift of M, who suddenly ‘passed’.
    At his back her cushioned pad;
    on his lap, her rug and his.

    Spirit now, he’s far from me.
    But still I see him sitting here.
    He’s dressed for work or dressed for bed,
    blanket-shawled in an old chair.

    I hear the turning of a page,
    and tick-tick-tick of our hall clock.
    These hours are mine as they were his.
    I read in bed and breathe his breath.

Joan Michelson has won first prizes in the Bristol, and the Torriano Poetry Competitions and she was awarded the Hamish Canham prize from the Poetry Society of England. Her writing has been selected for both British Council and Arts Council anthologies of New Writing. Her poems have been published in many literary magazine and anthologies in the UK and USA. Her first full collection, Toward the Heliopause was published by Poetic Matrix Press, 2011. Bloomvale Home, a chapbook, is forthcoming from Original Plus Books ,2016. Originally from New England, she lives in London, England

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***

    Hugh McMillan: A Proper Joke

    Through a haze of noise,
    late night juke box anthems
    and the beginnings of a fight,
    the door bangs open,
    and a blast of cold air heralds
    the entry of my Uncle Jack.
    He is dressed in a short sleeved
    shirt and flannel trousers,
    with a comical moustache
    like an ink line perched above
    his mouth.

    It is odd to see him
    like this, exactly like I
    remember him,
    odder still
    as he is dead.
    He stands at the bar,
    and the air between us is filled
    with a slight turbulence,
    as though sentences should be there.
    I cannot remember a single word
    from my Uncle Jack

    though it was known
    he was a funny man,
    holding people's head under
    the water until their ears
    felt like bursting.
    He and my father were close
    because of the war:
    It is said they both went bald
    on the same day.
    The last time I saw them,
    in Edinburgh in 1973,

    they didn't know who I was,
    and I never said.
    I didn’t like Uncle Jack.
    What he's doing here now,
    when I myself am losing hair,
    and so much complex time
    has passed, and he is surely dust
    long lost by the shores
    of the North Sea, is a mystery.
    Perhaps it is his idea,
    at last, of a proper joke.

Hugh McMillan is a poet from the south west of Scotland, well published

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***

    Barry Smith: Clown Town
    Bognor Regis Clown Convention

    Ping-pong noses red as poppies
    flat-flapping feet like squashed sausages
    stalking stilts tap-tapping, a family group
    of balloon-blowing jolly-jokesters
    whose pancaked faces reveal crease upon crease
    of lived-in, laughed-at, still laughing line-craters

    as Koko and Konrad and Zonko and Bonzo
    squirt yellow-toothed, cherry cola-ed mirth
    at camera-clicking, accordion-playing, burgered
    clown town: not one but a thousand –
    some surreal nightmare of circus gone mad
    with absent knife throwers and bearded ladies

    temporarily lost, but soon to appear,
    breathlessly asserting an elephantine presence
    here, town of clowns, down-town clown,
    in shabby splendour of baggy patchwork
    denying all that you or I hold most dear,
    but desperate laughter.

Barry Smith is the organiser of Chichester’s Open Mic Poetry and co-ordinator of the Festival of Chichester. His work has appeared online at youtube and in magazines. He was runner up in a BBC Proms Poetry competition and is co-editor of Poetry & All That Jazz.

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***

    Nick Cooke: What’s The Damage?

    My heart’s in the garage and the mechanics
    at work on it are shaking their heads.

    ‘What the hell’s this strip of plastic
    across the left ventricle?’ – A band-aid,

    rather old and worn by now, I dare say:
    a girl at primary school hacked a hole there

    just with her eyes. ‘And this, on the other side –
    are those bleeding stitches you did yourself??’

    Glumly I nod, and tell them the tale
    of God knows who, some archaic perpetrator,

    now a sin-forgetful grandma. They look at me
    like I’d tried to hold up a hurricane

    with bare hands. I shudder to think what
    they’ll say when they get to the rear

    and see the splatter of black-blue contusions
    I picked up in other wars. All in all,

    it’s going to be a costly little service
    and my warranty ran out years ago.

Nick Cooke has had poems published,in Agenda, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The High Window Journal, Dream Catcher, Poetry Space, I am not a silent poet & Nutshells & Nuggets and in the anthologies Poems For a Liminal Age and To Kingdom Come and others. His poem ‘Tanis’ won the 2016 Wax Poetry & Art contest and ‘Process’ was Highly Commended in the 2015 Segora Competition He is currently working on his first collection. He has also written several novels, a collection of stories (due from Sentinel in 2017) plus around twenty stage plays and eight film scripts.

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***

    Melanie Penycate: this is not my heart

    mine had a hole
    in it which stretched

    too cavernous for them to patch

    they took my chest apart
    and stole
    it

    now I own
    this strange heart snatched
    out while a dying soul
    was spiralling towards the light

    it beat alone
    held in the air
    high on a dish

    dropped in behind my ribs
    and stitched

    it wakes me
    in the thick of night
    with messages
    I can’t quite catch,

    it hunts for one who isn’t there
    it beats
               I miss you
    and
               I wish

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***

    Melanie Penycate: A Pausing Man

    He kneels to grant me my desire
    but pauses just before he screws
    the paper up to light the fire
    and drops his eyes to read old news,
    losing track of time and task
    until, frustrated by the cold
    and longing for the flames I ask
    what is the story there that holds
    his interest so long. At last –
    ‘Women get – in menopause’
    he reads it to me, from all fours,
    ‘forgetful’. So I’ll write this fast.

Melanie Penycate lives with her partner in a converted Blacksmith’s Forge in West Sussex. She is a recently retired teacher of English and Psychology. She has always written poetry and has two collections: Breaking the Arch from Guildford Poet’s Press and Feeding Humming Birds published by Oversteps books

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***

    Rodney Wood: Now Wherefore Stopp'st Thou Me?

    I’ve forgotten when I first read
    books about John and Mary,
    The Happy Train or Let’s Learn To Read

    but I remember the comics
    dad bought home each Saturday afternoon
    from work. Bundled in his arms were

    Beano, Dandy, Eagle, Hotspur, Look & Learn
    and I’d devour them one at a time
    and no one stopped me.

    I loved the strips: Corporal Clott,
    Desperate Dan, Dan Dare and the Mekon,
    Korky the Cat, Roy of the Rovers,

    Dennis the Menace, Biffo the Bear,
    The Iron Fish, The Bash Street Kids
    and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

    in issue 310 of Look & Learn.
    I can draw the old man with a grey beard
    and red and white sock for a hat,

    I can draw the wedding guests
    in their tricolours, ruffs and red jackets.
    and no one stopped me.

    I can draw the mariner with a cross-bow
    shooting the albatross.
    I can draw the ship idle upon a painted ocean.

    I can draw the ghostly green shades
    playing dice for the souls of the crew.
    I can draw the fierce monsters in the slimy sea.

    I can even draw the crew
    sinking in a whirlpool
    and no one will be able to argue.

Rodney Wood is retired and lives in Farnborough. He is currently holds the flag for the Woking Stanza, jointly runs an open mic at Send and is revising a novel, The Poet Assassin. His work has recently appeared in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, South, The Frogmore Papers, Message in a Bottle, The Lake and Stride; and anthologies such as Double Bill and The Poet’s Quest For God.

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***

    Ricky Garni: Rapscallions

    They are feeding LSD to the bison of Montana. This is not good.
    The bison are interested in LSD but it is not good for them at all.
    The owners of the bison are understandably furious about this.
    Bison cannot do the things that bison should do – like romp and
    mount – when they are hallucinating. What can they do about these
    acid eating bison? What will transpire with the bison population
    if the culprits do not desist? What will the world feel like when you
    can no longer say “Out there in the prairie – I think I spotted some
    bison” when the fields seem to glow in the pale light of limitless beauty?

    It is worth keeping in mind that the bison eat the LSD
    the first time out of politeness. The second time, out of desire.

Ricky Garni has worked as a teacher, wine merchant, musician & graphic designer. He began writing poetry in 1978, and has produced over thirty volumes of prose and verse since 1995. His work can be found in many online publications, print magazines & anthologies and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize on six occasions. COO, a tiny collection of short prose printed on college lined paper with found materials such as coins, stamps, was recently released by Bitterzoet Press.

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***

    Neil Curry: Mrs Woolf
                         on meeting Henry James

    With as many synonyms for the noun
    Solemnity, as mind of man could conjure up,
    He, Henry James, unsmilingly immaculate,
    Came to a standstill on Oxford Street.
    “Miss Stephen,” (Was he, she wondered, about
    To challenge her to a duel?) “I ? that is ? they
    Tell me, yes ? ahem ? they tell me that you ?
    As indeed your father’s daughter (slowly
    His hat reoccupied his head) nay, your
    Grandfather’s grandchild, (And what a head)
    The descendent ? I may say ? of a century
    Of quill pens, of ink pots and, yes, of ink;
    They tell me ? ahum ? in short, Miss Stephen, that you
    Write.”  Now to have denied such an accusation,
    And in a public place, struck her, she explained,
    As altogether far too churlish for words.

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***

     Neil Curry: Mrs Woolf
                           on Sir Leslie

    Take this faded kodak here for instance,
    This handsome couple with their baby girl,
    A baby who, by all accounts, is me,
    Yet I know no more of her than I do of them.
    He, as I came learn, was an accomplished
    Oarsman, an intrepid mountaineer.
    There’s that silver cup on the mantelshelf,
    An alpenstock rusting in the doorway.
    Events the likes of these are set down,
    They happened, are established facts.
    They are the granite in the landscape,
    Whereas feelings and emotions are
    As ephemeral and far off as rainbows.
    I do admit though that his great grief
    At the death of his wife seemed to us
    (And Oh how long, Mother, was I going
    To have to pay for that?) inordinate.
    When he himself died, after a slow, painful decline,
    The family gathered together
    All the black-edged letters of condolence.

Neil Curry‘s most recent collection Some Letters Never Sent was published by Enitharmon Press. These poems are from a sequence in progress to be called On Keeping Company with Mrs Woolf.

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***

    Ruth Hanover: On Waking

    Each morning
    I turn to face my country
    ideas of Mecca
    lost to me,
    long since.

    As I wake
    as I turn
    there you are
    my wife,
    my mother.

    Winter,
    this far north
    bereft of sunrise,
    I turn
    in the direction
    of my wife,
    my mother, then
    the others…
    as if I were the one
    to hold the list;
    my brother,
    my brother’s wife,
    her small child.

    Each morning
    my wife,
    my mother
    look at me.

    If it were only disappointment
    that I am here, that they —
    remain

    if it were only their
    hope in me,
    I would rise up

    but each morning
    my wife,
    my mother
    look at me.

Ruth Hanover‘s writing has been shaped by a degree in English literature, ESOL teaching in Cairo and Stockholm, a duty of care for family (Alzheimers), travel, and being in therapy. She has written a first novel, (unpublished), short fiction, and poetry.

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***

    Donald Atkinson: House, Syria,  2015

    Daybreak.

    Rising
    from her table of silence
    she crosses the room

    and arms stretched wide
    embraces the angle of the wall
    where sunlight
    stands like a man.

    Outside

    the grandmother
    knits as she walks
    a garment
    looser than blown sand.

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***

    Donald Atkinson: The best mother-of-god we never had
    after Fra Angelico

    When he stepped up from the garden
    with his unlikely news,
    he was of course too late:
    she was six months gone.
    A setback, technically,
    but a condition, none the less,
    of interest to an angel.

    Drawing her close,
    and en-arming her
    in his wing-like-an-Iroquois-headdress,
    he danced her a slow salsa,
    and felt the child stir
    as he passed her,
    cross-body.

Donald Atkinson is a recognised and award-winning poet, whose work has been published widely in poetry magazines, as well as by both Peterloo Poets and Arc Publications, over the past thirty years. Keeping Time is his sixth full collection.’

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***

    James Norcliffe: The last stop before Bethlehem

    The bus throbs patiently
    as I stand swaying in the aisle.
    The only eyes those of the man
    at the wheel in his rear-vision
    mirror, magnified, disembodied.

    The hospital had been less than forthcoming,
    but I had got the picture, or at least the frame.
    The wheeze of hydraulics opening the door
    and I’m so grateful for breath I
    murmur my thanks to the driver
    for delivering me to this sodium light,
    these windows, meters, these muted stars.

    There is a wind, too, again the breath
    of white noise, the whole city breathing
    with its eyes closed, whispering that I
    should join it blind-folded on some
    ridiculous trust-walk through the dark
    alleys and channels of its beating heart.

    But there is nothing to trust, really
    except to trust people to do their jobs:
    surgeons, bus drivers, and the tired woman
    leaning in the light behind this glass
    doorway who may or may not deliver me
    a long black, and should I so desire
    another and half an hour or so of her breath.

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***

    James Norcliffe: Three times upon a time

    Three times upon a time she told me that she loved me.

    The first time upon a time was in a lilac hedge under stars sprinkled like talcum.

    Embraced by leaves we embraced each other and in that embrace she murmured

    the words.

    The second time upon a time was frolicking in a field where wrapped around

    with grass we wrapped around each other and in that wrapping she whispered

    the words.

    The third time upon a time was in the ocean. As white horses crashed around us

    and gripped by an undertow we gripped each other and although the salt and

    surf all but drowned her words I understood clearly what she was attempting

    to say.

    And did we live happily ever after?

    We planted a lilac hedge and monthly clipped the heart-shaped leaves.

    We grew a lawn and mowed it weekly.

    We never visited the ocean.

James Norcliffe has published nine collections of poetry, most recently Dark Days at the Oxygen Café (2016). He has also written a number of fantasy novels for young people. With Harry Ricketts and Siobhan Harvey he edited the recent Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page (2014) and with Joanna Preston the anthology Leaving the Red Zone: poems from the Canterbury Earthquakes (2016)

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    Bruce Christianson: The Barbecue of the Vanities

    love checks the charcoal
    (still too hot to cook on)
    sets the wine to breathe
    then swears

    an ancient saxon curse
    (the birds look shocked)

                       blood trickles
    between love's fingers &
    drips across the compost
    (its a shame to waste it)

    soon we the guests arrive
    & admire the roses
                                        while
    love slips away unnoticed
    from someone else's story

Bruce Christianson is a mathematician from New Zealand. He has spent the last thirty years teaching in Hertfordshire. Love still has not returned his handkerchief.

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    Cal Freeman: Invective Against Mourning Doves

    They coo in the spruce behind Stu Price’s house, trying to soothe me
    with their nonsense.  I sit in my dead friend’s living room listening

    to a Bix Beiderbecke 78.  His children are huddled in the kitchen
    describing a man I did not know to neighbors who did not visit

    the old violinist or care much for the strange music that he played.

    They stay in their roosts long past dawn on the frigid days.

    They were once called Carolina Pigeons.

    That trumpet tone does not sound like a dove; pigeon is no clarion.

    Stu did not screech or moan though there must have been great pain
    given what was in his bones.

    Their wings screech as they take off to fly, So sorry for your loss,

    wired to return to wherever they feel safest and to panic
    at the rustle of last year’s leaves.

Cal Freeman, author of Brother of Leaving (Marick Press) and Heard Among the Windbreak (Eyewear Publishing), is a poet from Detroit, MI. His writing has appeared in many journals including The Poetry Review, Commonweal, Berfrois, Drunken Boat, and The Paris-American.

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    Michael W Thomas: Shame

    The cat calls to me from the garden:
    Are you ready for your death?
    I’ve had three lives, could do with
    more than nine, if only for how it feels
    to wither on the swell, meet myself
    coming back.  Each time, I flick me to the maggots
    as I land in fresh bed of heartbeats. I could be leaping
    the roofs of a runaway train.
                                                 But you’ve just the one.
    You must walk to that unlit door
    with your bag of hurts and history
    pulling down a shoulder, as I see them
    round here with their Saturday shops
    coming back from all their buses.
    Always something that leaks.
    Something meant for the freezer placed aside,
    remembered just in time to be thrown out.
    Always the wrong sort of something
    grabbed in a jostling blur.
                                              But for me too
    in the end. There’ll come a leap, a real cloud-tickler,
    that drops me down where the tracks are still singing the train
    and the birds of a sudden come over all safe.
    Shame, eh?
                      The cat vanishes,
    a car brakes, someone cries, someone else
    claps and whistles.  Come evening
    he’ll be outside the porch,
    chewing medicine-grass,
    getting his next call ready.

Michael W. Thomas‘s latest poetry collection is Come To Pass. His most recent novel is Pilgrims at the White Horizon. He is poet-in-residence at the Robert Frost Poetry Festival, Key West, Florida. He is working on Nowherian, the memoir of a Grenadian traveller. www.michaelwthomas.co.uk Blog, The Swan Village Reporter, http://swansreport.blogspot.co.uk/

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    Jackie Lovell: Cat Dreamer

    From outside the playground he called her
    Picked her after watching.

    Said he’d lost his pet cat, that he was sure
    He’d seen it down that dark alleyway

    And all he needed was her help
    His cat would come to her call. She was four.

    In nightmares she saw the cat, black
    Its tail low, strung out, its face a grimace

    And each time in the same scene
    His cat’s tail floated upright then spat.

    Years later when school was out
    She almost forgot how pretty she was

    Forgot her childhood nightmare, until uncle
    Needed his lap warmed when everyone was out.

    Yet uncle’s lap was never warmed for long enough
    And what started with a kiss took her teens away.

    In her twenties, after good grades, after bad
    After uni, she met a man after therapy

    Who she thought she could trust
    Yet, what started with a kiss

    Brought the nightmare black cat back
    Its tail low, strung out, its face a grimace

    And each time in the same dream
    His cat’s tail floated upright then spat.

Jackie Lovell has returned to writing poetry, having previously had poems published in Pharos: Paris and Offshoots V: Geneva. She is a member of Open Mic Poetry, Chichester.

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    S J Mannion: January In Ireland

    She’s all grown up now.
    All trussed up like a Tudor feast.
    At her dad’s funeral (she didn’t know him well)
    His brother came over and said
    Sorry for your loss, love.
    And then swallowing first
    Jaysus, you’re huge, you’ve gone huge.
    He said huge with two syllables
    Hew-age.
    His eyes fixed on her buttercream breasts.
    Luscious and richly spilling out of black lace,
    a corset worn tight outside by itself and
    pushed up over a pale plump belly.
    Tender as dough rising over torn velvet shorts.
    January in Ireland is not the weather for shorts.
    She hasn’t the legs either.
    Even with those fuck you heels.
    But she doesn’t care about all that.
    She’s proud of herself whatever she is.
    She knows the power of youth though
    She doesn’t yet know she knows.
    And so we laughed my sister and me.
    Really laughed and were glad of it all.
    Comedy and tragedy.  A right funeral.
    What else should we do?
    She’s all grown up now.
    Hew-age.
    And far from women who
    apologise for themselves.

S J Mannion writes “I am an Irish writer living in Christchurch, New Zealand. When I can I write – when I can’t I read.”

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    Jack Houston: And we all go to heaven when we die
    a confessional poem for Tom

    My wife will be there in the front row
    of the council crematorium,
    with the kids – maybe more than there are
    as this is written, maybe not –
    lined up beside her. My parents
    will doubtless be a part
    of the stars already.

    And Morwenna, for that is the name
    of my wife and lead mourner,
    will probably not want to say anything,
    not being too good with the idea of speaking
    in front of people, so will leave it
    to my brother, who, sobered,
    I’d’ve lately gotten closer to.

    He'll get up and shakily walk
    to the front, the little lectern,
    unfold the piece of paper
    he'd prepared his words on earlier
    but then break into great racking blubs,
    barely being able to force out a whispered
    I loved him so much.

    Adam will go up
    with his cousin William
    and lead the man that is their uncle, father,
    and my little brother, gently,
    wobbly and still sobbing,
    back to his pew.

    I always did like to make him cry.

Jack Houston lives with his wife and young son in London. He has poems forthcoming in Magma and The Butcher’s Dog.

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    Brian Docherty: Family Funeral

    What I find myself holding is one petal
    taken from the reddest of roses.

    I do not remember being given this petal
    or putting whatever else I was holding away.

    Some people hold handkerchiefs, handbags,
    hats, Orders of Service, mobile phones.

    I hold this one petal in my hand, waiting.
    For once, it’s not raining here, not even windy.

    Am I missing a page of the script? I know
    I’m in the right place, at the right time.

    I have never liked the idea of discarding flowers,
    wanting to respect the gift and the giver.

    I know I stepped forward, picked up
    a rose, threw it down, shook hands

    down the line of relatives, said the right things,
    had a small story of my own to share later

    over a pint of Guinness, with cousins I had met
    only twice before, but this petal is a puzzle.

    For a moment I think it is a ticket, but for what?
    What’s left is what we hold in our hearts.

Brian Docherty lived in north London for many years, & has retired to East Sussex. He has published four books, most recently Independence Day, (Penniless Press, 2015).

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    Tim Miller: Two poems from the sequence Burials

    Near Copenhagen (6000 BC)

    A young mother and child,
    the mother’s head pillowed

    with a cushion flat and
    decayed, decorated

    with deer teeth and snail shells,
    a pillow which must have

    glittered, and then rattled.
    And the dead child (as if

    to refuse its demise)
    sleeps atop the well-placed

    cupping wing of a swan.

    The Amesbury Archer (2300 BC)

    Grown up amid the Alps,
    he crossed the continent

    and sailed the Channel
    to die near Stonehenge.

    One kneecap was blown out,
    and he lived long with an

    abscess in his jaw, but
    he was buried with knives

    and arrowheads, boars’ tusks,
    and with the earliest gold

    in England wound into
    his hair. And among some pots

    were the knapping tools and
    a small anvil of a smith.

    Revered and regarded
    he died old at forty,

    pain in his leg and jaw,
    within sight of the great stones.

Tim Miller’s fiction, nonfiction and poetry has appeared in Poethead, The High Window, Parabola, Literary Juice, Bitter Oleander, Juked, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, Concho River Review, Foliate Oak, Mungbeing, and others. His long narrative poem, To the House of the Sun, has just been published by S4N Books, and a novel Bearing the Names of Many is forthcoming from Pelekinesis.

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    Bruce Barnes: Children’s shoes

    From a display of Roman children’s shoes
    imagine one, with muddy sole and foot-hugging thongs,
    scuttles out through the Vindolanda vicus
    down Ermine Street  as the wind picks up,
    to stop  beside an advert on the London tube;

    two images, like boots on the wrong foot,
    are caught in an abrupt lack  of air.
    Down the Underground, everyone sees
    across the tracks, two children walking;
    he wears a jump-suit and tam- o’-shanter,
    she’s older, with a satchel and bobble  hat.

    I follow her arm lodged  beneath his armpit,
    steering  him regardless past  the sentries
    of evergreens, between  ruled stock fencing
    to where they will  vanish.  The last speck
    races back to claw at my face, past the warning

    in a footsore purple that  ‘ Children’s shoes
    have far to go!’  Far is closer than the tunnel
    puking its train, nearer than mother’s tug
     at the sleeve.  Readying myself to board,
    I catch a last sighting, near where ad meets
    the tile grime: ‘and they’ll walk happily ever after’.

Bruce Barnes is a Bradford based poet, who has recently completed the Sheffield Hallam writing M.A. His poetry pamphlet, Israel-Palestine, published by Otley Word Feast Press, is due out shortly. His collaboration with Jun Shirasu, interpreting the work of the Japanese proletarian poet Kosuke Shirasu, is published by the Utistugu Press and will appear later this year.

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    Akpa Arinzechukwu: A Day Off

    Your journey to the unknown started the moment you looked your boss in the eyes and called him ‘rogue' –
    your journey to the unknown started like this: you woke in the morning around four-thirty five am, you ran
    into the kitchen and prepared noodles as it was the only thing you could ever get cooked easily. You got a
    text from your ex, it reads: five pm, Murray Bar. You hissed, how dare that son of whatever text me? What
    does he think I am? You brushed the thoughts aside and headed for your bathroom but his words, his face,
    his naked self kept appearing in your head. You remembered the night you two went your ways, he called
    you ‘ugly', he said that your face reminds him of Iran and Iraq – he said many things – so many things you
    have not forgotten but just chose to be quiet. You ran your hands over your abdomen and then up to your
    bosom. You let out a moan. What an unlucky day, you thought. You later headed for work carrying the weight
    of the memory of your days with him to work. At work, you opened avenues for your ambition but then your
    boss shut a particular door just in time. He told you you’ll not be paid soon. That though the company has
    grown in everything they can’t afford to pay employees. It is just not a priority yet. The economy is bad, can’t
    you see? He yelled.  Other employees looked too, murmuring only to themselves. They had known this before
    you. No one protests. You can lose your job. You were dead angry and you let it consume you and your boss so
    that not even your bones withstood the shock. You are a ro.gu.e! – you took your belongings and walked out of
    the corporate world into the streets wondering whether to go home and sulk or go in search of another job or
    just go home, dress up with well articulated, well drawn and well applied cosmetics and zoom off to catch up
    with your ex and explore the world with forgiveness which you said once makes the human race.

Akpa Arinzechukwu is a Nigerian poet and photographer. His works have appeared on brittle paper, bluepepper, Visual verse and elsewhere.

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